News Analysis

WASHINGTON, Nov. 5—Perhaps the most important future implication of the news that the American birth rate is dropping significantly is what might be called population peristalsis. In biology, peristalsis is what happens when a pig is eaten by a python. The bulge moves gradually along the length of the snake until it is fully digested. Lower birth rates, if they continue, would result in something exactly parallel. And population peristalsis, in turn, could cause continuing and considerable changes in American society for the next half century.

The big bulge in this case consists of some 74 million Americans who are now 23 years old at the oldest and or 5 at the youngest. These are the young people born in the postwar baby boom. On a graph of the entire population by age, this group sticks out like the python's dinner.

If birth rates continued high, this baby boom generation, like its predecessors, would be outnumbered or at least equaled by its successors.

Continuing Bulge

But now, it appears, the baby boom generation—nearly 40 per cent of the population—will remain a bulge throughout its lifetime.

Some see this influence already present in the popular attention devoted to the current “youth culture.” But that, the argument goes, will inevitably change. Gradually, the emphasis on youth may become an emphasis on young married couples.

In time, as the bulge passes farther through the nation's age structure, there may be, in one demographer's words, “a massive lobby for increased Social Security benefits.”

Thus—always assuming that birth rates stay low—the dominant social concerns of the nation at any given time could be generally predicted.

“You'd look to see where the bulge was at that time,” says Robert Parke Jr., deputy director of the Federal Commission on Population Growth and the American Future.

For the short term future, the outlook is more specific.

“The next 15 years is the era of the young married,” in the view of George H. Brown, director of the Census Bureau.

The demand for housing is obvious, he says, and this might focus on high‐rise and garden apartments, since if birth rates stay low, families will become gradually smaller.

But manufacturers of equipment for babies should not despair, says Ben. J. Wattenberg, a Washington business consultant. In a new study, “The Birth Dearth and What It Means,” he observes:

“Bassinets, diaper bags, cribs, strollers — all these purchases for a first baby would soon skyrocket. If fertility goes down in America in the years to come, it will not be because of a lack of first babies.”

The outlook in education is also strongly subject to the influence of the baby boom bulge. Elementary schools are already noting gradual declines in enrollment at the primary levels. The bulk of the bulge has already moved to higher levels.

By 1985, the Census Bureau estimates, the last of the baby boom children will be leaving high school. In that year, the population aged 15 to 19 is expected to total 17.8 million, compared with a present total of 19.1 million.

The education topic illustrates the difficulty of more specific prediction. Once the boom generation passes on to working age, what, for example, will be done with the surplus capacity left in colleges? Might it then be used to support intensified adult education?

Other Factors Affected

A further difficulty of prediction is that even so pronounced a generation bulge itself will be affected by other deep factors operating in society.

One example is the combination of the increasing tendency of wives to work and the rise in apartment living. This could, Mr. Wattenberg speculates, make possible such conveniences as automated minigroceries in the basements, lined with elaborate coin machines.

He also cites the idea of Ray Wolfe, a Toronto supermarket executive.

According to this idea, since every apartment has the capacity to deliver fresh water to each tenant, “Why not milk?” It could be delivered by tank truck to an apartment house and then flow, metered through sanitary piping, to a tap in each apartment. The savings could be immense.

And that would only be one of the smallest changes arising from population peristalsis: a boon to hardware stores for faucets labeled hot, cold, and milk.

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